Small Question on US Presidential Elections

Hey Guys,

With Presidential elections you need the set amount of electoral votes. How would you work these out if you took away a group of states? For example IOTL the 1816 PE had a 109 limit needed to win, but in my TL I've taken away the New English states and also America doesn't own Louisiana (thus no state of New Orleans). How would I work out what the electoral vote needed is now? Would I just take away the amount of electors from these states from the amount of electors votes that are minimum to win?

This would be 109-54=55. Or is not how you'd do it?
 

Philip

Donor
You need a simple majority in the electoral college. Each state has a number of electors equal to the sum of its senators and representatives. Just remove the appropriate number.
 
Also, be aware of, and keep tabs on how population shifts and Constitutional differences in your TL impact the number of representatives in the House a particular state is allotted, as this will change the number of electoral votes that a particular state has in the Electoral College.
 
Also, be aware of, and keep tabs on how population shifts and Constitutional differences in your TL impact the number of representatives in the House a particular state is allotted, as this will change the number of electoral votes that a particular state has in the Electoral College.
 

Glen

Moderator
Yep. What they said.

Unless you are going to generate ATL population numbers for each remaining state, then this may be more work then you want (it was for me:eek:). However, you can 'guestimate', and then once you are far enough from the POD given butterflies and divergence just assign reasonable population numbers to each of your states and calculate 2 electors for each state (ie their number of senators) plus 1 elector for each representative (depends where you put the cut off for representatives, every 40,000 is how it started IIRC). Remember that even states under 40,000 in pop will get at least one representative. Later on, you might want to change the ratio or make it based on a percentage of some set number of representatives (which is what happened eventually IOTL).

Remember too that your timeline (posted elsewhere...btw, really should use that discussion thread rather than multiple 'question' threads, or else put these in the help section), has the US faring oddly in a war, so that will change voter actions and thus you don't quite have to worry as much about what happened in the OTL electoral college.
 
To aid in the guestimation. The results for every election, how the eletoral college voted for which candidate can be found on wikipedia for that election year. For example, you would want to type in "Election of 1816".
 
Also remember that a state that is admitted before that state has gone through an official US Cenesus will have 3 electoral votes for those elections before a census can determine congressional seats.
 
This is the electoral vote count for 1816.

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